The Open Source Advocate

Today at Linux World, VMware announced the winners of the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge. I entered this competition with a useful virtual appliance called " NeDiVA " (Network Discovery Appliance). NeDiVA will automatically discover your Cisco network devices and gather a plethora of useful information about your network. Sadly, I did not win a prize, nor did I receive an honorable mention. As a consolation prize, my ego is comforted by the fact that NeDiVA was downloaded more than 600 times. Thank you, bittorrent. This announcement was not all bad news, since I discovered some very interesting virtual appliances. The following list of winners can also been found on the VMware website. First Prize ($100,000) HowNetWorks , a high-level network analyzer. (Mikko Hiltunen, Erno Kuusela, Joachim Viide, Mika Seppänen, Jani Kenttälä; University of Oulu, Finland) The HowNetWorks virtual appliance is a network analyzer that works at a higher level than ...

Taking pictures of lightning is not as hard as you might think. Tonight there was a nice electrical storm in Ogden, and I managed to take these pictures: Here is what I do to take photos of lightning. To start with you need a digital camera, but you don't need a high-end camera. I recommend a tripod, but you can get away with setting the camera on any stable object. You need a lightning storm (duh) and it is probably best if it is not raining while you are shooting pictures. Set your camera on a stable surface (preferably a tripod) Manually focus your camera at infinity (set it so that distant objects are in-focus) Point the camera at the horizon, or wherever you see a lot of lightning Put your camera in "Shutter" mode and set the shutter speed to 1/3 of a second Use the continuous shooting mode on your camera to capture the shots My Fuji cameras have a continuous shooting mode called "Last Four". This mode will allow you to continuously take pictures, but ...